Dead End

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  St Augustine’s was an incongruously big church for the streets it found itself in, hinting at larger, wealthier, or at least more devout congregations in the past. It was nineteenth-century Byzantine, built of soot-smudged pale-red brick with white stone coping, like a dish of slightly burned brawn piped with mashed potato. Inside it was a miniature Westminster Cathedral, cavernous and echoing, with lofty arches lost in shadow, pierced-work lamps, gilded wall and ceiling paintings, windows stained in deep, jewel shades of red and blue and green, and dark-eyed, beardless El Greco saints with narrow hands and melancholy mouths staring from every corner. There were high, wrought-iron gates across the choir, and the orchestra had been set up in the space below them on a low platform. Chairs and music stands and the timps were all that was to be seen. The players themselves had been ushered away somewhere – presumably to whatever place had been set aside for them as dressing-rooms. Slider hoped, anyway, that they had not all disappeared. Like tea, statements were best taken freshly brewed.

  He and Atherton walked down the central aisle towards the scene, which was lit by overhead spots so that it stood out from the cave of comparative darkness around, like a gruesome reverse Nativity. The body was sprawled face down on the small podium between the lectern, on which the score lay open, and the long-legged conductor’s chair. He had fallen quite neatly without knocking either over, which suggested to Slider that the bullet had not struck him with great force: he had crumpled rather than reeled or been flung off his feet. And in the place of ox and ass there were two people keeping guard over the body: one Slider recognised as the orchestra’s fixer, Tony Whittam; the other was a dapper, plumpish, bald man who was kneeling on the floor at the head of the corpse and weeping. Every now and then he wiped the tears from his face unselfconsciously with a large handkerchief held in his left hand; in his right he held the conductor’s baton by the point, so that the bulbous end rested on the floor. It looked like the ceremonial reversing of a sword.

  As soon as he saw Slider, Tony Whittam stepped towards him with a cry of relief. ‘Am I glad to see a friendly face! Are you the official presence?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘This is on my ground.’

  ‘Well, that’s a piece of luck,’ Whittam said. His usually genial face was drawn into uncharacteristic lines of shock and anxiety. He was a well-fed, dapper man of fifty-two going on thirty-five, in a light biscuit suit and a tie that would have tried the credibility of a twenty-year old. The orchestra’s personnel-manager-cumagony-aunt was much given to gold jewellery, sported a deeply suspect suntan and an artificially white smile, and altogether had the air of being likely to break out into a flower in the buttonhole at the slightest provocation. He looked like a spiv, but was in fact superb at his job, efficient as a machine and genuinely warm-hearted. Many a time Slider had seen him in the middle of a crowd of musicians, all clutching their diaries, all hoping to get off one date or on another; and he had always managed to spare Slider a glance and a friendly nod while coping patiently with the conflicting demands of, say, Mahler Five and the personal lives of a hundred-odd freelance and therefore temperamental artistes. Perhaps it was unkind mentally to have cast him as an ass.

  ‘Who’s this bloke?’ Slider asked in an undertone with a gesture of the head towards the ox.

  ‘It’s Radek’s dresser. He’s a bit upset.’

  Understatement of the year. ‘Dresser?’

  ‘That’s what he calls himself. Sort of like his valet, personal servant, whatever. Been with him years. Everyone knows him.’ He was, Slider realised, justifying the man’s presence.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Keaton. Arthur Keaton, but everyone calls him Buster.’

  ‘Okay. And where’s everybody else?’

  ‘Down in the crypt – that’s where the dressing-rooms are, and a sort of band room for coffee and warming-up. I thought it best to keep everyone together until someone came,’ he said anxiously. ‘Des is with ’em, keeping ’em quiet.’ That was Des Riley, orchestral attendant, who set up the platform and loaded and unloaded the instruments – a dark, ripely handsome man dedicated to body-building and fornication. Since orchestral attendants were traditionally known as ‘humpers’, these would seem to be the two essential qualifications.

  ‘You did just right,’ Slider said reassuringly. ‘Is everybody all right?’

  ‘Oh yes – I mean they’re shocked, as you’d expect, but nobody’s hurt.’ He nodded significantly, to convey to Slider that by everybody he understood him to mean Joanna.

  ‘Who else was here apart from the musicians?’

  ‘Well, there was Bill Fordham’s wife and kid – first horn – they’d come to watch; and Martin Cutts’s latest bird, of course; and the verger, he was mucking about back there with some keys,’ he gestured with his head towards the back of the church. ‘And Georgina, my assistant, but she was through in the vestry making a phone call. They’re all down there in the band room. Radek’s agent was here earlier, but she’d gone before it happened. And Spaz – he’d already left as well. He’s taken the van away – there’s nowhere to park it here.’ That was Des Riley’s assistant, Garry Sparrow, usually known as Gaz the Spaz, a witticism none too subtle for him.

  ‘All right. You’ve done very well,’ Slider said, and crouched to take a look at the body. Radek had been lean and upright, one of those wiry old men who go on for ever and never look much different once they’ve passed fifty. Slider, musical tyro though he was, recognised him, as he supposed about seventy-five per cent of people would, whether they were music-lovers or not, now that he’d been on the telly. For Radek was not only hugely famous, but physically distinctive. He was very tall, gaunt, and had a great beak of a nose and bushy white eyebrows over heavy-lidded eyes, so that he looked like a half-pissed bird of prey. His shock of over-long white hair was brushed straight back like a lion’s mane, but once he got going, it flew about as if it had a life of its own. It was his hallmark; and his photograph – invariably moodily-lit and against a dark background – loured, snarled and brooded famously on a million record-covers, white mane and white hands spiked against the blackness, the archetypal image of the super-maestro.

  Today he was dressed in civvies of course – fawn slacks, with a black roll-neck sweater tucked into them, leather moccasins and, my God, pale yellow socks.

  ‘He doesn’t look as impressive as he does in white tie and tails,’ Slider murmured to Atherton.

  ‘Nobody looks their best dead,’ Atherton reminded him.

  There was no doubt he was dead, at any rate, Slider thought. Radek’s face was pale grey, with a touch of blue about nose and lips, and the skin looked unpleasantly moist, like sweating cheese. His eyes were open and fixed, staring as no eyes ever stared in life, and his lips were drawn back from old-man’s long yellow teeth as though he were baring them in defiance. There was a bitter smell of sweat about him, a whiff of aftershave, and underneath that a faint, unclean smell, which Slider associated with mortality. Radek was lying more or less in the recovery position, one leg slightly drawn up, and both his hands were clenched – the right lying beside his head, the other, caught under him, seemingly locked onto the cloth of his roll-neck.

  The entry wound was in the right lower side at the back, just above the belt of his slacks; quite a neat hole, surrounded by a blood stain. Slider examined the podium and slipped his fingers in underneath the body, but there was no blood and seemingly no hole on the other side.

  ‘No exit wound,’ he said.

  ‘Still inside?’ Atherton said.

  ‘Presumably. He must have been hit at extreme range.’

  ‘Or else it was deflected.’

  Slider grunted agreement, and stood up, turning to Whittam. ‘All right – you saw what happened?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Whittam said unwillingly, as though it might incriminate him. ‘I was standing at the side, over there, making sure everyone was in place, just waiting for Radek to start. Once they were off, I was going to join Georg
ina in the vestry. I’d got a lot to do, and it was a late kick-off already.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Atherton put in. ‘I’d heard Radek was a stickler for punctuality.’

  ‘He is. Woe betide the musician who’s late. He won’t step on the platform if anyone’s missing.’

  ‘But he’s not punctual himself?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Oh he is usually. But he was in a rotten mood today. He’d had me up and down to the dressing-room half a dozen times, complaining about everything, and Des couldn’t get away. He treats him like a personal servant, you know, despite—’ He gestured with his head towards Keaton, who was still kneeling beside his dead master like Greyfriar’s Bobby. ‘Then when he finally deigned to come upstairs he stood over there by the vestry telling me the arrangements he wanted for tonight, as if we hadn’t gone over them ten times already. Bloody temperamental celebrities! I tell you, dear old Norman Del Mar was never like that.’

  ‘All right. Go on,’ Slider urged. He wanted to get the general picture before the rest of the team arrived and the scene fragmented.

  ‘Well, he got up on the podium and lifted his stick, and everyone got ready, and he just sort of stood there a minute – working himself up to start, I suppose. And then there was this bang – like a big heavy door slamming. It made my heart sink: I thought it was the verger frigging around up the back, and there’s nothing a conductor hates more than someone making a noise at a moment like that. Breaks his artistic concentration, you see. I expected him to turn round and bawl me out for it, but he just crumpled up and fell. And then Martin Cutts’s bird screamed, and old Buster came running past me shrieking like a hen, and it was only then I sort of put two and two together and realised he’d been shot. I ran over, but it was obvious he was dead.’

  ‘Did you see who did it?’

  ‘No, that was the trouble, you see – everyone was looking at Radek. By the time I even thought to look round the bloke had gone, whoever he was, and it was the same for all of us. But the verger was up the back, as I said. I think he may have seen him.’

  ‘Doctor’s just arriving, guv,’ Atherton murmured, looking over his shoulder towards the door. ‘And it looks like the photographer behind him.’

  Slider glanced back. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ve got about a hundred people downstairs to interview. We’re going to need the cavalry. Call home and get everyone here who can read and write.’

  ‘And McLaren as well, sir?’

  ‘Get on with it. And when you’ve done that, see if Niobe here’s fit to speak yet.’ He turned to Whittam. ‘Can you take him somewhere and find him a cup of tea or something? The doctor will want to get to the body.’

  Whittam jumped eagerly at the chance to be useful. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll take him in the vestry. It’s nice and quiet there.’

  ‘How do I get downstairs?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Over there, that door,’ he pointed to the opposite side from the vestry. ‘You can’t go wrong, it doesn’t go anywhere else.’

  The door led onto a dank corridor which ran the length of the church. It was lined with an assortment of stacking chairs, elderly cupboards, and cardboard boxes full of mildewed bunting, torn crêpe paper decorations, remnants of junior nativity play costumes, and other bits of typical church-hall junk. Looking right, he saw at the far end a door onto the street, and beside it another door leading back into the body of the church; turning his head to the left he saw stone steps leading down, and a whiff of cigarette smoke and a murmur of voices told him he was facing the right way. At the bottom was another corridor, and immediately to his left the doorway into a large room furnished with sundry chairs, trestle tables, mirrors, and a ballet barre across one end which was largely obscured by coats. A tea urn and trays of cups and saucers filled one table, and the orchestra was hanging around, making itself as comfortable as it could in the manner of people accustomed to being kept hanging around in various dismal locations all round the world. They were chatting, dozing, smoking, reading and, in the furthest corner where the trombone section lurked, playing cards on somebody’s upturned instrument case. Joanna called it the airport terminal syndrome, with the emphasis on the terminal.

  Joanna was sitting on the massive old-fashioned radiator right next to the door, her legs dangling, her hands knotted loosely between her knees, her head resting against the wall, her eyes closed. She seemed very pale, and the lines around her eyes and mouth looked more pronounced than he remembered. He wondered how close she had been to the podium, how shocked she had been. He was so glad to see her it took him a moment or two to find his voice.

  ‘You shouldn’t sit on radiators,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll get chilblains.’

  Her eyes flew open. She stared at him almost blankly, and then, to his relief, there was a softening of her expression which, whatever it betokened, was on the side of pleasure rather than dismay.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it isn’t the mild-mannered Bill Slider.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Dog it was That Died

  ‘You’re looking rather pale,’ Slider said.

  ‘I’ve just seen someone killed,’ she said. ‘You think with television news reports – Bosnia, Northern Ireland and everything – that you’ve seen it all. But it’s different in real life. One moment there’s a real human being standing there, just a couple of feet away from you, and the next—’ She shook her head. ‘How do you ever get used to it?’

  ‘We don’t,’ he answered, divining that she meant the question personally. ‘If we stopped minding, we’d stop being effective. The flippant remarks are meant to fool us, you know, not you.’

  ‘Poor Bill,’ she said.

  He wished he could take that as encouragement; but he had work to do. ‘How close were you to the podium?’

  ‘I was sitting at number four. Close enough, thank you.’

  ‘You’ve been promoted,’ he discovered with delight. The front four in the first violin section were permanent positions, while the rest of the section moved up and down on a rota system so as to share the work evenly. ‘What does that make you?’

  ‘Deputy principal,’ she said shortly.

  ‘That’s wonderful. Why didn’t you—?’ But of course he knew why she hadn’t told him. He altered course hastily. ‘Well, I’m just thankful you weren’t hurt. There was only one shot, is that right?’

  She raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Am I being a witness now?’

  ‘You are a witness, like it or not. But you can be especially helpful to us – to me – because you know what we need. You know—’

  ‘My methods, Watson,’ she finished for him. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

  ‘Start with your version of the incident.’

  ‘Well, Radek came out from the vestry—’

  ‘I thought he had a dressing-room down here?’

  ‘He did, but there’s another set of stairs down from the vestry. The conductor, and soloists if any, go up and down that way to avoid having to rub shoulders with the great unwashed, namely us. I’ve done concerts here before, you see. I know all about it.’

  He smiled because she had anticipated his question. ‘You see?’ he said elliptically.

  ‘I’ve already accepted the premise,’ she said, giving him a firm look. ‘You’re not bright enough to put a scam by me.’

  ‘Thanks. I understand Radek was late starting.’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s usually punctual, but they’re a law to themselves, you know, conductors. It’s our job to wait for them, not vice versa. It was only five minutes anyway. It was two thirty-five by my watch when he stepped onto the platform.’

  ‘Did he seem as usual when he came on?’

  She made an equivocal face. ‘I didn’t notice anything specific, but I wasn’t particularly looking. He was always an ugly, bad-tempered old bastard, not the sort you gaze at rapturously. He seemed to be in a bad mood, but that was
nothing unusual.’

  ‘All right, go on.’

  ‘Well, he crossed the platform, got up on the podium, opened the score, picked up his stick—’ He could see her watching it replay in her mind.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘He’d put it down on the lectern while he opened the score. Oh, and he took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his face. He always sweated a lot. It could be pretty nasty sitting up front. He’d flick his head to get his hair out of his eyes, and drops of sweat would fly.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, he wiped his face, put his hanky away, picked up his stick and said, “Mahler”.’

  ‘Telling you which piece you were going to rehearse?’

  ‘Of course. So he waited for everyone to find their place and get their instruments up. And then—’ She hesitated.

  ‘Go on. However it seemed to you.’

  ‘Well, he stopped with his stick up, just staring at nothing, frowning. He might have been communing with his muse, I suppose, assuming the nasty old thing had one, but it didn’t quite look like that. He looked more as if he’d remembered something bad, like he’d left the gas on or he ought to have paid his VAT yesterday or something. He put his hand up and pulled his roll-neck – like this – as if he was loosening it, like a nervous gesture.’ She looked at Slider. ‘I don’t want to make too much of it, because it all happened so quickly, but it was something I noticed.’